Seating structures, such as bicycle saddles or car seats, are known to be designed to meet structural strength and compactness needs, in addition to user comfort and convenience requirements.
In view of the above, a variety of solutions have been proposed to add comfort to such structures. For example, the seats have pads of resilient materials, such as sponge, foam, polyurethane foam or gel. Furthermore, they may have lower spring members or the like, to oppose the user's weight and to absorb any shock or abrupt oscillation.
An apparent limitation of such solutions is that the user is almost totally unable to adjust the resilience of elastic members as desired, thereby customizing the shock absorbing properties of the whole structure.
In an attempt to obviate such drawback, certain solutions have been proposed to solve the above technical problem.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,007,149, which forms the basis of the preamble of claim 1, discloses a bicycle saddle having a plurality of replaceable elastomeric elements between the shell and the cover element, to increase or decrease the resilience of the saddle pad.
This prior art solution has the apparent drawback that the elastomeric elements are placed almost in direct contact with the ischial region of the user, thereby causing discomfort.
During normal use of the saddle, the user tends to move, thereby causing the elastomeric elements to slide relative to each other, and take improper and unnatural positions.
Moreover, this configuration has a reduced ability to absorb shocks and abrupt oscillations associated to the normal use of the seat.
From IT-B1-1248202 it is known a seat structure having all the features of the preamble of the main claim 1. In particular, this known seat structure comprises a shock absorbing member having an insert that a user may introduce to control and selectively adjust the overall elasticity of the shock absorbing member.
Unfortunately, the introduction of the insert is very difficult, thus dramatically affecting the efficiency of the shock absorbing member and the integrity of the whole seat structure.